Category: indie rock

Fated to Pretend

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g11mgmt

New Pazz and Jop Village Voice rock critics’ poll.  I contributed to this for years and was always thrilled when the editors chose a couple of my elaborately-wrought witticisms/quips for inclusion in the commentary section.  The only one I remember is something I wrote about Pavement “giving the Badfinger to the rock and roll singer,” which they used as the caption for a photo of Pavement; this made my week/year, nerd that I was.

It makes me a touch melancholy how little the Pazz and Jop poll now seems to matter.  Before blogs, it was one of the only occasions (the only?) for pop music critics to crack wise, make jokes, and spin out ambitious theories apart from the strictures of a record review or band profile.  Now Robert Christgau’s over at MSN.com, and at best, it’s just another concatenation of online opinion.

So anyway, my big discovery so far from the poll (which is still useful as a guide to the year’s music) is MGMT, whose name I’d seen but had not paid any attention to.  They’re two former Wesleyan undergrads who make a kind of psychedelic electronic pop; their song “Time to Pretend” (#4 on the singles poll), extravagantly produced by a guy from the Flaming Lips, is beyond brilliant and catchy.  Youtube won’t let me embed the video for some reason so here’s the link.  Gets my vote for best/catchiest “single” of the year along with “Paper Planes” (btw can I say how ripped off I felt when I realized that the song does not actually appear anywhere in Pineapple Express, not even in the closing credits?  Whoever had the idea to use “Paper Planes” in the trailer made that movie.)

I also just finished reading Barney Hoskins’ history of pop music in L.A., Waiting for the Sun, and “Time to Pretend” resonates with the book for me as a delirious narrative of dropping out, jettisoning the straight life for good, and disappearing into an abyss of drugs, money, models, and rock and roll:

This is our decision, to live fast and die young.
We’ve got the vision, now let’s have some fun.
Yeah, it’s overwhelming, but what else can we do.
Get jobs in offices, and wake up for the morning commute?

Forget about our mothers and our friends
We’re fated to pretend
To pretend
We’re fated to pretend
To pretend

I’ll miss the playgrounds and the animals and digging up worms
I’ll miss the comfort of my mother and the weight of the world
I’ll miss my sister, miss my father, miss my dog and my home
Yeah, I’ll miss the boredom and the freedom and the time spent alone.

There’s really nothing, nothing we can do
Love must be forgotten, life can always start up anew.
The models will have children, we’ll get a divorce
We’ll find some more models, everything must run it’s course.

We’ll choke on our vomit and that will be the end
We were fated to pretend
To pretend
We’re fated to pretend
To pretend

It could be the confession of any of the lost narcissists of California pop whose stories Hoskins tells, fantasists “fated to pretend,” some geniuses, some just poseurs or hangers-on (some both, needless to say), making up their identities, doing way too much coke, marrying and divorcing models; for the less fortunate ones, an eventual ignominious death by mishap, for the luckier, eventual rehabilitation with memoir a la David Crosby.  Hoskins really allows one to see Darby Crash, Arthur Lee, and Tim Buckley (for example) as part of the same continuum of doomed/self-destructive L.A. singers.  (On rock and roll deaths, see this site.)

Anyway, the song is an irresistible “amuse bouche” as Charles Aaron put it, filled with outlandish musical flourishes and unearned grandeur.  “Kids” is also great.

Love is All “Last Choice”

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Love is All are a punky Swedish pop band led by Josephine Olausson, who has a somewhat Bjork-like presence and warbling singing voice.  Amazon tells me that people who buy their second album A Hundred Things Keep Me Up At Night also buy Los Campesinos!, so I guess I’m predictable in my affinity for Western European hyper/catchy punk-pop with clever lyrics.

“Wishing Well” is a total rip-off of the Clean’s great “Tally Ho,” in a good way (that manic Farfisa riff).  See below for a video of them performing it live.

The other most memorable ones are “Sea Sick,” about a terrible cruise ship experience – would be a good soundtrack to David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” — and probably my favorite, “Last Choice.”   In this one Olausson tells the story about eventually going home with “her last choice” at a party, someone she “vaguely knows”: “I’m not about to be left alone/ I’m sitting on the sofa on my own…/ He’s not my type and I’m not his but I’m sure he’s all right/ I’m not your kind and you’re not mine but for tonight you’ll have to do!”  For a song about a meaningless one-night stand, it’s weirdly touching and “inappropriately upbeat,” and somehow reminds me of that Christmas novelty song by the Waitresses (“Christmas Wrapping”).  (What is it that makes it seem Christmasy?  Is that a glockenspiel?)  There’s definitely a 1980s New Wave/post-punk feeling generally (saxophones, for example).

My Will Oldham profile

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will-oldham-bonnie

Here’s my Will Oldham profile.  (Here’s the New Yorker‘s).

Will Oldham opened the door of his Louisville ranch house, which would have been the perfect size for an upwardly-mobile young family had it not been filled with overflowing boxes of pink tank tops and multi-colored Crocs.

He punched me quickly in the face, muttering ambiguously, “I don’t like press… but I did really love that Pulitzer Prize-winning 2001 Ken Auletta profile of Ted Turner, which is the only reason I’m talking to you today.”

Chewing thoughtfully on marijuana-infused bubble gum, Oldham explained to me that he just wants to be recognized as a hip-hop superstar like his peers Li’l Wayne, R. Kelly and L’il Mama.  “I don’t understand why some listeners consider me to be contrived or affectedly backwoods,” he commented while absent-mindedly pulling old Gypsy good-luck charms, horse-shoe nails, baby mice, and fragments of burlap sacks from his bristling beard. He explained that his name changes every week according to a passphrase system “in order to keep the focus on the music.”  During our interview, his name changed to L’il Viceroy Archduke; when I accidentally addressed him as Mr. Oldham, he punched me in the face again, shouting furiously, “it’s all about the music, man!”

The brash hip-hop superstar, stripping down to nothing but a plaid flannel shirt,  a new pair of 4-color Cayman Crocs, and a pink Boston Red Sox cap, stepped into the shower. Morosely warbling the Mariah Carey smash “Fly Away (Butterfly Reprise),” he seemed to be having fun.

I Say it’s Prog-Rock, and I Say to Hell With It

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Saw Deerhoof last week.  Was kind of underwhelmed.  Loved the amazing drummer Greg Saunier, who beat the hell out of his kit in a Keith Moon/ Animal-from-the-Muppets way.  They all play their instruments really well (they are “classically trained,” some of them anyway) and there are some great riffs and moments, but in the end it feels like what we 30-somethings (only for a few more months, yikes!) used to call prog-rock.  Showing off, jamming, rococo elaboration for its own sake.  And I haven’t warmed to Satomi Matsuzaki’s keening vocals, sometimes in Japanese, sometimes nonsense in English (quite likely also nonsense in Japanese, but I can’t tell).  I can think of singers, like Joanna Newsom, whose vocals at first struck me as affectedly weird but came to make sense to me.  But Matsuzaki mostly just seems like someone keening in a discordant/precious way with no particular payoff.

Punk/post-punk cycles dialectically through austerity and minimalism, and then back to the elaborate and rococo, fueled by the constant need for novelty.  It’s partly just a matter of taste, but the new-rococo/ prog-rock often feels contrived and arid to me.

I don’t hate Deerhoof, was just, again, underwhelmed.  Have not checked out the new album, though.

Here’s the great 1928 E.B. White New Yorker cartoon.  Apparently broccoli was somewhat exotic in the 20s.

Catchiest Album of All Time?

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Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals may be the catchiest workout/dance album of all time.  It’s almost an unfair contest, in relation to normal music, since the GT guy just steals the catchiest hooks from pop music of the last few decades and (brilliantly) splices and sutures them together so it all functions as an apotheosis of the form of the mixtape.  I liked the last album but found it comparatively resistible compared to this one, which is unceasingly fun, smart and hooky.  When I put it on, it had C&I shaking their booties on the dance living-room floor within seconds, but some of the lyrics are not so appropriate for the Pre-K set so I had to take it off.

Each track contains a dozen or more samples — some of my favorite mashups include:

Soulja Boy “Crank That” + AC/DC “Thunderstruck” + Journey “Faithfully”

Pink “U and UR Hand” + Underworld “Born Slippy” + the Cure “In Between Days” + Thin Lizzy “Jailbreak”

R. Kelly “I’m a Flirt” + Fleetwood Mac “Gypsy” + M.I.A “Boyz” + Rock Ross “Hustlin” + David Bowie “Rebel Rebel”

Tag Team “Whoomp! (There it Is)” + Big Country “In a Big Country” + the Velvet Underground “Sunday Morning” + the Cardigans “Lovefool” + Edgar Winter Band “Free Ride” + Timbaland “The Way I Are”

Yo La Tengo “Autumn Sweater” + Metallica “One” + Carpenters “Superstar” + Lil Mama “Lip Gloss”

There’s a particular wit produced by the combination/integration of some of the whitest music of all time (e.g. the Velvet Underground, the Cardigans, Yo La Tengo, the Carpenters, Journey, etc.) with recent hip-hop.  [There’s an implicit joke made about this, I think, in the Procol Harum “Whiter Shade of Pale” + Blackstreet “No Diggity” mix.]  I was listening to it on the elliptical machine yesterday morning, surrounded by sloowly exercising retirees while watching Sanford and Son without sound on the Y television, which added an extra frisson of je ne sais quoi.  (The plot had something to do with Redd Foxx bringing home a bunch of seemingly homeless men who grabbed sandwiches from the kitchen table — did not really understand what was going on but was impressed by the grittiness.)

You can get the album here on emusic.  (Email me if you’d like an “invitation” to try Emusic which gets both you and me 50 free downloads, or I guess I only get them if you stick with it for more than a month.) I think it’s also free on the Illegal Art webpage.

Bon Iver “The Wolves (Act I & II)”

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I initially resisted this guy — he came to town a while ago and I decided not to go because he struck me as a bit too affected in the Devendra Banhart mode: solo folkie strumming acoustic guitar, but “weird” in ways that seemed predictable. But the album grew on me, especially this song. I guess the deal is that the record was recorded while he spent the winter in his father’s cabin in Northern Wisconsin, where there may actually be some wolves around (? coyotes for sure), getting over a breakup. Think an Upper-Midwestern Nick Drake, maybe. This song is pretty intense and haunting, especially when the falsetto vocals start to tweak like Justin Timberlake and the percussion loops pile up. “Don’t bother me, don’t bother me” seems an appropriate refrain under the circumstances. I also like “Stacks” a lot.

Reflections on World Music

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Let’s face it, World Music is a dubious category that can have an annoying/patronizing side: oh, those festive native costumes and delicious exotic polyrhythms.  At its worst, World Music can be dull global pop that would seem completely middle-of-the-road minus the foreign language/accent and colorful outfits.  Our town has this annual Fall world music festival that includes the potentially irritating sight of swarms of aging white Midwestern yuppies/new-agey types dancing badly to imported exotics playing African drums.

And yet…. in fact and notwithstanding the built-in ironies and problems, I love the Lotus Festival.  You pay your $33 and get to wander in and out of eight different venues all within a few blocks of one another (churches, night clubs, tents); we usually end up catching 6 or 7 acts in the four hours or so.  It almost always seems to be a gorgeous evening and the music tends to be about 50% interesting and worth checking out, 25% a bit disappointing, and 25% completely great.  The problem with the cynical take on World Music is that it kind of presumes as a norm the extreme homogeneity of pop music.  So in fact, what from one perspective can seem like exoticizing can also be understood just as a different take on modern popular music that does not give priority to the one tiny slice of traditions that we normally experience (e.g. the Western rock/pop mode).  My fond memories of Lotus festivals in the past include some truly amazing and unexpected music like the “Tuvan throat singing punk rock” of Yat-Kha, who did a Black Sabbath cover; the Gangbe Brass Band from Benin — it seems there’s been more than one really awesome brass band over the years; the Boban Markovic Orchestra from Serbia; the Peruvian chanteuse Susana Baca; the Be Good Tanyas.

So, this year these were my favorites:

Etran Finatawa from Niger, who combine “Wodaabe chants,” “a blend of choral polyphony and high tenor solos,” with a kind of blues-derived electric guitar drone.  It’s a lot like the great Tinariwen (not quite as great: if you want to try one semi-recent World Music album, check out their Aman Iman).  They wear “traditional long embroidered tunics, leather hose and turbans with ostrich feathers” and “adorn their faces with yellow spots and stripes,” so yes, the scene in the tent with the 95% white audience could be seen as having a diversity sideshow aspect, but the music was mesmerizing, the costumes looked great against the dimming blue sky behind the stage, and why should musicians have to wear jeans?  (I did imagine to myself these guys before the show saying, “Time to get folkloric, guys, where’d you put the can of yellow paint?”)

Pistolera, three women with tattoos and one guy, they seemed very Austin but I guess are from Brooklyn, sort of a fusion of trad Mexican ranchera music (with accordian) with a kind of indie rock sensibility.  They did a cover of Bob Marley’s “War” (“Guerra”).  Lots of fun.

Reelroad, “Russian post-folk.”  This was our fave actually, maybe partly because seeing them in a little club (rather than one of the big outdoor tents) felt more intimate.  They play “folk songs from northern and central Russia and Siberia” with a kind of punkish approach and style.  Eight people on the stage at times, four men and four women, the women cute, the men all slightly grouchy-seeming with some significant facial hair, they obviously were having a blast and reminded me a bit of a Siberian Pogues.  Towards the end these frat boys and sorority gals starting coming in the club for (it became clear) a dance party scheduled after Reelroad.  The girls were all wearing variations of the same Britney Spears skimpy dress; our friend Leah remarked “I think those boys are gonna get lucky tonight.”  They were sort of milling around, shouting and dancing in front in what I assumed was an ironic or mocking way, the girls teetering on their heels, although we got the feeling that some of them couldn’t help but actually get into it.  The dudes had a slight edge of menace to them, you felt that it wouldn’t take much to provoke them to knock some tables over or something.

Caught a few other bands too.  I was disappointed by Marta Gomez who I guess I’d hoped would be like Susan Baca or something but was, for my liking, too tasteful and soft-jazz in approach.  The setting of the big bland convention hall probably did not benefit her.  Vieux Farka Toure, son of the great Ali Farka, was pretty good but had a slightly wanky guitar-blues element.

The next day Sarah took the girls to the afternoon free concert in the park, but I was busy at my all-day departmental retreat in a big convention room lined, like Kurtz’s cabin, with human skulls (replicas I think; it’s an archaeology institute).

Os Mutantes Happy Meal/ Chris Knox Heineken

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I know this sort of thing is old hat by now, but this still sort of blew my mind. I’m watching game 5 of the NBA finals, it cuts to an ad, and I hear a familiar tune over a scene of a bunch of a first graders playing soccer. It’s (not that I remembered the name of the song) “A Minha Menina,” a great Os Mutantes song that I know from their 1999 Luaka Bop compilation Everything is Possible. For those of you who don’t know them, Os Mutantes (the Mutants) were a Brazilian psychedelic rock group from the late 1960s/early 70s who were re-introduced to the non-record-collecting Anglophone world by David Byrne with that compilation album — but are still pretty obscure in the scheme of things.

So I’m watching the cute kids playing soccer, trying to figure out what it is, and then the losing team gets the ultimate consolation prize of… a Happy Meal!! It’s a fricking McDonald’s ad!!!

Again, I should be used to the ineluctable globalist cool-hunting margins-to-center logic of late capitalism, but this still freaked me out a little bit. I guess just because I don’t think of McDonald’s as one of those cool-hunting corporations when it comes to advertising — aren’t their ads usually super-mainstream?

Here’s the ad, courtesy of Stereogum.

addendum: now I’ve learned that the catchy/weird song from that Heineken ad is by New Zealand indie rock legend Chris Knox of Toy Love & the Tall Dwarves. Strange. Here’s the ad:

Lykke Li “Little Bit”

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In honor of Eurovision (final tomorrow May 24!), here’s a mesmerizing, great single by Sweden’s Lykke Li (love the video, too; dig the calisthenics in knee-high black socks, and the bearded loon on piano).
Lykke Li’s album Youth Novels (to be released in the U.S. June 17) was produced by Björn Yttling of Peter Bjorn and John, which makes sense when you consider the haunting cowbell in this song and something similar in “Dance Dance Dance,” which put me to mind of the whistling and percussion in PB&J’s immortal “Young Folks” (though Lyyke Li is less indie, more dance-pop than PB&J). Yttling is sounding like an indie-rock Timbaland in his resourceful way with catchy little looped pieces of percussion. Really, this is just about the catchiest single since “Young Folks” (OK, and “Umbrella” maybe.)
In “Little Bit” Lykke Li starts with denial — “hands down/ I’m too proud for love” (nice line, suggesting “don’t touch”) — and moves towards grudging acceptance. Actually, the song could do for understatement what Alanis Morrisette did for irony: “I will do it, push the button, pull the trigger, move a mountain, jump off a cliff because you’re my baby and I love you I love you… a little bit.”
Yes, apparently her name is in fact pronounced “Licky Lee.”

Iron Man

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Iron Man was fun. Iron Man is a robot, HAL, 3CPO & R2D2, and especially, I thought, Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still; he’s a cyborg, part machine part man (and a techie friend of various other pet/helper robots); he’s a golem (I wonder if the Jewish golem tradition ties in any covert way into the film’s surprisingly retrograde anti-Arab depictions — though of course the movie makes efforts to protect itself from this accusation: these are just the evil WARLORD Arabs, not the good family-minded ones). He’s a self-guided weapon: there’s something amusingly retro in the idea that a supercharged suit for an individual could be a crucial military tool in 21st century geopolitics (the Terrence Howard character comments at one point about how the instincts and intelligence of a human pilot will never be beaten by robotic intelligence — yeah, right.) And most explicitly, he is the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz trying to get/find his heart.

Robert Downey Jr. was an inspired choice, of course. I thought Gwynth was charming as Pepper Potts although the gender dynamics are as pathetically pre-feminist as in most such movies; or even more so, as she is an indeterminate secretary/butler/girlfriend.

Some fun musical choices: Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” blasts out over the final credits in a satisfying way. And early on Tony Starks is grooving to Suicidal Tendencies’ “Institutionalized” while he tinkers with one of his gadgets. Hope those guys got a fat royalty check out of it.

Btw, A.O. Scott observed that Jeff Bridges’ character confirms the Law of the Bald Villain; Bridges also clarifies that anyone who rides a Segway in popular culture (unlike our friend Susan, who looks really cool in on her Segway and is definitely good) must be evil.

Previews were almost entirely superhero. I have to admit, the new Hulk with Edward Norton looked pretty good, a bit of Jason Bourne to him.